The Shakings: The meeting of the Atlantic Margins – Projeto realized during the residency prize Sesc_Videobrasil at Raw Material Company – Dakar, Senegal.

This project is dedicated to three great women: Estelita de Souza Santana, perpetual judge of Irmandade de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte/in memoriam (Cachoeira-BA), Solange Farkas and Koyo Kouoh.

The Sacudimento da Casa da Torre e O Sacudimento da Maison des Esclaves em Gorée form a diptych whose central theme is the “shaking” or the “exorcism” of two great architectural monuments linked to the Atlantic slave trade and colonization.

Both performances were thought of as a diptych and I am pleased to see that this doubling of the performative action in each Atlantic margin, was perceived as an articulated proposal of intervention in two major architectural monuments; one associated to the old Portuguese colonial system, in the case of Tower House of Garcia d’Avila, Bahia, and the other to the slave system that linked Africa to the New World, the Maison des Esclaves [House of Slaves] in Goree island. When I developed the performances, I wondered how could I critically resume the colonial past and slavery to reflect on the historical and social conditions present in both Atlantic shores, that is, what were the lasting consequences of colonization and slavery for Africa and Brazil. This question that I asked myself was, however, to be proposed and realized through art forms such as performance, film and photography.

The Shakings

The practice of shaking, held every day in the city of Bahia and the Recôncavo by so many people linked to religions of African origin, but not only by them, aims to avert, above all, “eguns” from the home environment – spirits of the dead that, recalcitrantly, remain among the living, bringing them all sorts of discomforts and misfortunes. The holy people, as are called the ‘started’ in Candomblé, make use of hot leaves, “gun”, to “shake” or “hit” the house, giving blows with the leaves of the branches which, in dense bundles, resemble brooms that throw out of the environment the “egun”. These leaves, Ossanhe property, the Lord of Leaves, Divinity – Forest are also associated with other deities, as Iansã, Lady of the Lightnings, of the storms, which has great power over the “eguns”. The energy that these leaves give off when you hit with them in the corners of a house is very hot, contrary to the power of “eguns” and, therefore, disperses them, quenching them. But one would have to ask what are the “eguns” that inhabit the Tower House and Maison des Esclaves and need to be quashed. To me, the death that must necessarily abandon us, but with the condition that first we remember it; have its conscience; and that the very present become in our own historical present, is the history of colonization and enslavement whose consequences are very current in places like Bahia and Africa. If you want to “shake up” something, if I have the urge to exorcise something, history, without a doubt, is that as it relates to my artistic action, my critical thinking as both an artist and a citizen, and above all, as a man. When I set out to “shake” the Tower House of Garcia d’Avila, I was moved by the historic news, or rather the historical fact, so often repeated of the abuse of the slaves of this great lineage of masters were submitted, owners’ estates so extensive that, at that time, were another Portugal.

When I “shaked” the Tower House, the only “egun” that was there, that those walls were pregnant of even after so many years, was the slave master; more, the only “egun” that there was, that haunted me for remaining among us, because there, from the Tower House, his castle or fortress, he migrated and seeped into the whole social fabric of Bahia; but not only that: it was the coming violence of slavery and the old colonial system, which bequeathed to us an extreme inequality and also as its fruit, poverty. But the violence of which I speak is also the one that is the result of poverty and inequality; the domestic violence suffered by women and children, especially. When I “shaked” the Tower House, I wanted to purge our historical past; wanted to “shake up” history, making the past present by the action of shaking. If this is a sort of exorcism, cast first the “egun” history; makes the past present by the shaking; I evoke history, spell it, to then intervene in it as an artist and as a man in order to push her away, not of memory – for us to remember the past is a condition to act on it and make it sure that it does not repeat – but of the everyday practices through its overcoming. For me, the shaking of Tower House of Garcia d’Avila was a kind of catharsis. If Aristotle said that catharsis was a kind of purging of the passions, I can tell you that the shaking was for me exactly what he spoke of. While “shaking up” the Tower House, I thought of myself as an artist, as a historical agent, as a social being, but also as a man, as black and as an artist that is the fruit of the African diaspora in two ways: as a result of forced migration of black people to the New World and miscegenation; and also as a result of this recipient that blended so many cultures of Africa, America and Europe, resulting in the unspeakable wealth of “Black Rome” that Roger Bastide spoke of; and that I’m part of.

This same desire for exorcism took me to the other Atlantic margin, the one that the black slaves came from. I chose the Maison des Esclaves, in Gorée, as a site to form alongside the Tower House the diptych. I think of them, the two buildings, one in each Atlantic margin, as mirrors that mutually elucidate each other. One represents the violence of leaving; laying on the threshold which, when crossed, takes the opposite Atlantic shore that one rarely returns; the American margin would be that of the coat, the host, but of a violent welcoming.

When I think of the shaking the Maison des Esclaves, on the island of Gorée, the problem that lies in front of me is analogous to that which moved me to undertake the shaking of Tower House of Garcia d’Avila, in Bahia. Gorée, known as a point of departure of slaves to the New World, presents us with the exile of the problems, of forced migration, of the expropriation of humanity. Maison des Esclaves is a halfway house, where one stays for some time determined by others, that who takes hold of the humanity of the slaved; the one which decides his fate. Goree amazes me as a landing site, of passing, but to another world, the other Atlantic shore, where it will live integrated into the colonial-slave system; and, accordingly, the truly liminal point of Maison is called “the door of no return”. The liminality of this “door” is a frightening fact, because after transposed the entire human condition known up until now, it becomes part of an earlier, a precedence that is not only spatial but also temporal. It is as if the “door” to operate a double cleavage: one before, who splits time at an earlier stage of enslavement, forced migration, integration into the New World, but also splits the space between what is known, domesticity, the mundus; and that other exile, of that which is foreign, and in which we will have to learn how to live, but with longing. The houses in which I made my performances are both places where humans lost their humanity for violence of various kinds, physical, above all, but also, symbolic. This, without a doubt, unites them.

The trees

A ‘being’ that is part of both houses is a large tree. At the Tower House, there is, in the ruins, a giant fig tree or figueira-brava; in Gorée, a large baobab tree. I made sure to focus on these two large trees, which are sacred to the saint people. Both are associated with the idea of ​​”passage”, as the fig tree is a tree that connects earth to heaven, the “aiê” to “orun”; while the baobab is the tree connected to the deity Nanã, death, and raises the idea of ​​threshold and transposition, always involuntary, to the other side of life. I wanted to explore the ideas of “connection”, of “solidarity”, and, at the same time, of “limit”, taking these two trees as a metaphor of these ideas.

The presence of these two large trees in the houses in which the shakings were performed immediately raised me a lot of questions. They were not planted, but simply born in these places that colonization, exploitation and slavery were deeply marked . The gameleira at the Tower House, seemed to me as a kind of signaling to the possibility of overcoming the past through a critical juncture between the past to be overcome, and the present that is given by artistic-political intervention, that overcoming . If the gameleira unites two worlds, for me, united past and present, allowing that, from the now and where am I, I be able to intervene in history as an artist. The fig tree grows from ruins as man overcomes, through the critical action, the ruins that history has bequeathed us.

The baobab allows, on the other hand, the thought of death, but I think it, within the performances, as the death caused by history, which produces deletions. By focusing on the tree, I want to make it clear, I want to show that all the erasing should be avoided by critics and artistic action.

Art can be political without ceasing to be art and it is from the specificity of the nature of their language that derives its strength. The pictures produced in this project are as indexes of a bigger picture; that of the performance, of the videos and their interface with their own photographs. The assembly of the videos and photos in mirror is a metaphor of the Atlantic margins, which elucidate themselves as the glow of shaking, which, by heat, by the sparking of the leaves, flashes points in history, so as to overcome its legacy.